NFL, union scheduled to meet

NFL and NFLPA Meet Face To Face and Other Legal News

The NFL and NFL Players Association meet today in Washington. It’s the first meeting of the sides since the NFL Management Council put forward an economic proposal on Nov. 4. The owners’ proposal, which is believed to include a rookie wage scale, credits to owners for expenses and stronger forfeiture rules on guaranteed money paid to players who fail to perform, was a critical first step to allowing meaningful negotiations to go forward since the union was solidly entrenched in the position that since the owners had opted out of the old CBA, they had to make the first offer.

Both sides have agreed to a gag order on negotiations, but sessions to date have been characterized as lacking substance. Perhaps today’s meeting will begin to bring substantive discussion and produce some plan for how issues will be prioritized.

49ers drop tampering charges against Jets

APDid tampering charges help bring WR Michael Crabtree and agent Eugene Parker back to the negotiating table with the Niners?

A while back, when I said that the 49ers’ tampering charges against the Jets were merely a negotiating tactic in their protracted cold war against Michael Crabtree and his agent Eugene Parker, I received many unflattering comments from readers telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Several even went so far as to reproduce the language from the tampering rule to prove their point. I enjoy writing for the National Football Post because even when readers are insulting me, they’re incisive. On Monday, 49ers President Jed York announced that his team was dropping its tampering case against the Jets.

With Crabtree signed and playing, there was no need for the 49ers to antagonize Parker, who has an enviable client list, or use resources looking for evidence that Deion Sanders was acting on behalf of Crabtree and Parker when he said on NFL Network that Crabtree was aware of two teams that were willing to meet his salary demands. The tampering charges were the 49ers’ “shot across the bow” of Crabtree and Parker, saying that if Crabtree was going to play this season it would be in San Francisco -- and to that extent, the charges may have helped bring both player and agent back to the table.

As I said then, for the Jets to be accused of tampering was low-hanging fruit, and the league office probably has an employee dedicated to taking calls accusing the Jets of tampering since it has happened so often. The problem here was always proving tampering without an email or someone actually confirming it. In this case, it may have required Sanders being considered to have been acting on Crabtree’s behalf in talking to other teams about him. While Sanders’ ongoing relationship with his former agent Parker is hazy, his role as a commentator on NFL Network should have given him other sources of information that there was interest in Crabtree based on need, speculation or past action that might have made tampering difficult if not impossible to prove. Moreover, while the league isn’t running the NFL Network as a pure and independent news organization, it does have an interest in keeping the sources of its on-air contributors from being the subject of league hearings.

The decision, while likely the right one for the 49ers to move on and focus on improving their team rather than using management resources to potentially get a draft pick from the Jets, appears to be an unpopular one with Bay Area fans still angry over having been penalized a fifth-round pick for having tampered with Bears LB Lance Briggs in 2008.

American Needle briefs

APNFL commissioner Roger Goodell

On Nov. 17, the NFL filed its final brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the American Needle case. The case, if you haven’t been following it, is a potentially groundbreaking one which could declare the NFL and all its member teams a single entity incapable of colluding or conspiring with itself. This would be a dramatic change in how the law looks at sports leagues in the U.S., which has historically been a collection of competitors acting together, thus making leagues almost always in need of protection from violation of the antitrust laws. A decision for the NFL in American Needle would possibly make leagues exempt from antitrust challenge from owners, players and others. It would also greatly diminish the influence of the NFLPA, which provides a great deal of the league’s current antitrust protection through the Statutory Labor Exemption.

The case has prompted a flood of amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs, from interested non-parties urging one outcome or another, from a veritable who’s who of sports leagues and lawyers including Jeff Kessler of Dewey LeBeouf on behalf of the NFLPA; Roy Liebman on behalf of the NFL Coaches Association; Shep Goldfein of Skadden Arps on behalf of the NHL; Jeff Mishkin of Skadden Arps on behalf of the NBA, and Solicitor General Elena Kagen on behalf of the United States. What could be the most important contest this season for the NFL may be played in Washington on Jan. 13, when the case is set for oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

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